It probably took some time to go through the Worker's Comp process and the payout was probably limited. So then you start looking for people to sue.
Part of the rationale for worker’s comp is to limit liability for the companies... historically.
Pennsylvania had a very “progressive” system at one point, before people could sue their employers - you'd get $50 for a leg, $100 for an arm, and so on... (numbers fudged but in the ballpark). Then you could starve to death outside the mine, when that ran out... maybe in six months, maybe in a year, unless you could somehow find a job that only required one arm. That was still better than most states, which treated people as disposable - because you wouldn't want people suing employers over unavoidable workplace accidents, right?
It helps to know how these things evolved. There were two forces at work - shielding companies and shielding workers - and a good deal of evolution. The original ethic was that you worked at your own risk, period. As you can imagine, there was no incentive for most employers to have any sort of regard for safety. In fairness, some types of work were just very dangerous due to the technology - George Westinghouse saved untold lives by inventing the air brake (just as Clessie Cummins did when he invented the diesel brake). He also probably stopped the #1 cause of loss of limbs among railway employees.
I was trained in org psych, learning from the companies’ perspective - often from the leaders’ perspective - so I thought I should learn about the other side. It's quite illuminating and explains much of what we have today. There's apparently no way to avoid the extremes, but without the threat of lawsuits, things like car-lift safety would be handled by the “wait till it falls on top of the mechanic, then repair it” method. Henry Ford was famous for that — one of the last of the truly uncaring industrialists — he advertised a wage almost nobody could get, far and wide, not for his own reputation (though that happened) but so he could have a long line of “replacement parts” at one end of the factory as the dead and wounded were thrown out of the other side.
I won't say the legal system isn't a mess full of rapacious lawyers and insane judges, because it obviously is. I've watched judges in action and find it hard to believe some of them got any training at all. I've seen how cases sorted out, like the one someone mentioned with the minivan latch where the guy was driving drunk, at night, headlights off, the wrong way down a one-way street, and Chrysler had to pay millions to the survivors. Yup. That sucked. But this case seems almost sane - people are working around a broken worker's comp program, and again, there were two forces creating that, one protecting workers and one protecting businesses...
